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ZKJ Autobio Copy Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska - Autobiography* Roots and Early Years My grandfather’s family comes from the village of Kocin Stary near Częstochowa (southeastern Poland), which was said to have been inhabited by many Kielans, and the people in the area used to say that “the Swedes live there.” According to family legend, we are descended from a Scandinavian prisoner of war, from the times of the Swedish Deluge (1655– 1660). There is a name Kielland in Norway, which could have been changed into Kielan in Poland. However, I have never managed to visit Kocin to explore my family’s roots. My grandfather, Walenty Kielan, went to Podlasie during his military service. After leaving the army he got married in Sokołów Podlaski and settled down there. He worked as a cashier for the revenue service. My grandparents had nine children. Their living conditions were so difficult that Franciszek Kielan, my father, having only completed the four years of elementary school, had to start working at the age of twelve in the office of an examining judge secretary. Initially, his work involved copying petitions, but, at the age of fourteen, he had received enough training (which is hard to believe but true) to become the examining judge’s secretary and manage the office on his own. He went to Suwałki at the age of fifteen to work in the office of the public prosecutor. Being talented, diligent, and well-liked, he was encouraged by the lawyers who employed him to continue his education. They helped him cover the high-school curriculum and to prepare for the extramural high school finals. In 1915, the public prosecutor’s office in Suwałki, along with most other Russian institutions, was evacuated to Russia. The revenue service where my grandfather worked was also evacuated and consequently almost the entire Kielan family moved to Russia. My father passed the extramural high-school finals in Russia and worked in various cities and institutions as a military official in the rank of a chief warrant officer. Having survived the October Revolution, which claimed the lives of his two brothers, he lived to see the fall of 1918 and returned to his homeland with his parents and siblings. My father planned to attend university, but the fate intervened when he was called up for army service at the beginning of 1919. He met my mother, Maria Osińska, in Łuków while he was serving in the army as a second lieutenant. She was descended from duniwassal gentry. Having graduated from a private girls’ high school in Łuków, my mother had just started her first office job. My parents * Written and translated by Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska, 2009; edited by Hans-Dieter Sues, Smithsonian Institution, 2010. 1 were married in 1922 and moved to Sokołów a year later, where my father worked as an accountant in an agricultural and trade cooperative. My sister Krystyna (Krysia to family and friends) was born in 1924, and I first saw the light of the world on April 25, 1925. In 1926 my father was offered a job as an inspector (i.e., as an accountant) for the Association of Agricultural and Trade Cooperatives in Warsaw, and my parents moved first to Warsaw and later in 1928 to Lublin. I still remember our five-year stay in Lublin quite well. With my mother holding an office job as well my parents started to prosper. My mother was always surrounded by books and there was always something for her to read. She was also a member of a Women’s Sports Club and used to play tennis, ice-skate, and ski. My father, on the other hand, after returning from work, having dinner, and reading a newspaper, used to sit at his desk and work on his first book. It was a textbook entitled Accountancy in an Agricultural Trade Cooperative, which had been commissioned by the Association of Cooperatives. The book proved to be a bestseller because it was bought by cooperatives nationwide that had difficulties with implementing new accounting methods. I have no idea when and where my father learned about accounting, but, at that time, he was already considered an authority on this subject. With considerable royalties from his book my parents bought a piano, and we learned to play this instrument. My sister and I attended a small private elementary school in Lublin, which was run by a friend of my mother from the Sports Club. We moved back to Warsaw in 1934 and lived in Żoliborz, initially in the Warsaw Housing Cooperative, and, from 1937, in an apartment purchased by my parents in the “Fenix” Housing Cooperative at 4 Wilson Square. I remember one funny episode from this time. A group of more than twenty persons from my father’s side, who lived in Warsaw, decided that we should spend the Christmas Eve 1936 together. Krysia and I were against such a large family gathering because we thought it was impossible to maintain a real Christmas Eve atmosphere with such a large group of people. However, we had no say in this matter. On our way to my aunt who had a large apartment on Krucza Street downtown, I took along a textbook in mathematics, a notebook, and a fountain pen. Having arrived at her place, I sat at the farthest corner of the huge table to express my disapproval. With the notebook on my lap under the tablecloth I did all the mathematics assignments for that school year while everybody else was eating Christmas delicacies and singing carols. In 1937 I passed the competitive examination for the Aleksandra Piłsudska Sixteenth National Women’s Gymnasium located on Inwalidów Square in Żoliborz. I remember this exam as a very stressful experience. The last two years before the war passed quickly. As a scout, I attended two scouts camps, and I had reached the age of fourteen when the war broke out. There is yet 2 another reason why the year 1939 was a special time for me. It was at that time that I came to the conclusion that the Roman Catholic faith was illogical and full of contradictions and that I could not believe any of it. Luckily, my parents, although traditional believers, were non- practicing, and thus my refusal to attend church services was readily accepted. Many years later, when my atheism was well established, one of my believer friends said to me with an air of superiority: “Not everybody is capable of experiencing the concept of God.” My response was that it seemed to me that I was capable of experiencing what he called God and which is the universe to me, but I could not accept this concept based on the interpretation by shepherds from the Middle East several millennia ago. The War Years I spent the Siege of Warsaw in September 1939 with my mother and Krysia in the basement. Father, like the majority of male residents of Warsaw, was away hiking at the time and returned home in October. In the fall of 1939, all high schools, colleges, and universities in the General-Gouvernement were closed on the order of the German authorities. Nevertheless, already in November 1939, I started attending the third grade of an illegal gymnasium, which was called the Clandestine Classes of the Sixteenth National Women’s Gymnasium. The classes were conducted in groups of several people in students’ apartments. In the fall of 1940, our indefatigable headmistress, Janina Lubecka, managed to obtain a permit from the German authorities to open two schools, one for knitting and one for gardening, in our old gymnasium building on Inwalidów Square. There were two curricula in the gardening school. One, accepted by the German authorities, included teaching German and gardening, while the other one, illegal, was a regular high school curriculum. In 1940, Krysia, who was a grade ahead of me, followed our father’s advice and started attending the Cooperative High School, which was one of a few legal business schools in Warsaw. However, a year later she decided to study agriculture at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences (SGGW) and moved to a general high school. Thus, from 1941 Krysia and I went to the same grade of high school at our pre-war gymnasium. It was in the same year that a new classmate, Jana Prot, arrived and we became friends. It soon turned out that Jana had no place to live because her father was in England, her mother and her younger brother lived in a cloister in Laski near Warsaw (well known for its boarding school for blind children), and Jana had just gotten evicted from her place. We took Jana home, offering her to live with us, and our parents agreed to that. At that time we did not know that Jana was Jewish. Some three months later, one of our acquaintances, who had known Jana’s father, told my parents about 3 her descent. My mother told me later that, when they found out about it, she and my father were so nervous that they could not sleep at night. However, they finally decided that “what will be, will be” and Jana remained with us. In the fall of 1942, a seven-year-old girl, Romana Laks, also lived with us for a short time. She and her parents had left the ghetto and she awaited placement in a cloister where she survived until the end of the war. In 1991, the Yad Vashem organization honored my family as the “Righteous among Nations” for the help they offered to Jews during the occupation. During 1942-43, we attended the clandestine classes again and took the high school finals, which all three of us passed in 1943.
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